The Opera Programme 2025
Like a magnifying glass, the works programmed at the Festival this summer intensify our disquieting doubts, our oppressive loneliness and our threatening fears – but also our brightest hopes and most secret desires. On stage, they enable us to perceive nuances, look the outrageous in the eye, and consider the world and the urgent questions of our times, our humanness, within a safe space.
Handel’s Giulio Cesare takes us to a battleground where everyone is fighting everyone else. The loneliness at the pinnacles of power is depicted without mercy. – A power play also chains Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I together. Two queens fighting for the English throne, caught in a net of intrigue. “What binds them together eternally is a terrible fact: one of them must die.” In Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, we accompany the title heroine in her last hours – and also her victorious enemy. – The plot of Verdi’s Macbeth is no less horrifying. Caught in the whirl of powerful prophecies, the Scottish ruler becomes “a plaything of his madness, his fear, his moral downfall”. He is accompanied on his murderous path to destruction by his wife, Lady Macbeth.
The act of removing oneself from the world is traced both by Peter Eötvös’ Three Sisters and the double evening that unites central works by Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler under the title One Morning Turns into an Eternity. Fearful expectation fills the woman looking for her lover in Schoenberg’s monodrama. In her fever dream, she wrings hope from existential insecurity and profound desperation, despite everything. Bidding farewell to her lover finally removes her to a state of blissful transcendence. In a project conceived for Salzburg, the ”Path of Light” is invoked, a vision of being human which remains a dream, an unattainable longing in Eötvös’ opera.
Striving for power, hubris and excess on the one hand – melancholy passivity, time- and aimlessness as well as transcendence and escapism on the other, mark the scope of the action and chronological horizon of the protagonists. Cleopatra, Elisabetta and Maria Stuarda, Lady Macbeth, the three sisters Olga, Masha and Irina, a lonely nameless woman continuously transforming herself – those are the strong female protagonists of the 2025 Festival summer. Like their male counterparts, they reach for power with violence, fearfully await the future, and rise to dazzling heights. They experience immeasurable desire, suffer in uncertainty, fail helplessly, and hope – as we all do.
First published in the Festival insert of Salzburger Nachrichten